Tricycle Blog

This great little item has been making the rounds lately: Jim Carrey's Burma video. Good work, Jim! Love the long hair, too.
Here's the U.S. Campaign for Burma site. The government of Myanmar is one of the most brutal in the world. Promising signs, though, as this astonishing protest showed. The BBC's profile of Aung San Suu Kyi here.
Update: Buddhist monks join pro-democracy protests in Myanmar.
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When I type "Buddhist" into Google, the wise and witty search engine promptly suggests "Buddhist symbols" as the search I should perform. I wonder why? I blame Body Vows.
When you think "Buddhist Punk," you may picture Brad Warner or Noah Levine. But Google Images thinks of this.
Buddhist Geeks is interviewing artist and Naropa professor Robert Spellman. Cool.
- Philip Ryan, Webmaster
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I happened to click over to Killing the Buddha today and noticed they've more or less relaunched in a new bloggy way. Part of the blogization of the world, I guess. In ten years there will be no more jobs, no more people nor wars nor car accidents nor even credit card debt -- everything will just be blogs. Well, there may still be credit card debt floating around.
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Human Rights Watch says that 89% -- or 2,196 -- of the people killed by the "separatists" and "insurgents" in southern Thailand since January 2004 are civilians. They are careful to say separatist and not use the "T" word -- a good thing, since the word's overuse by the current junta in Washington has rendered it essentially meaningless. Oh, I guess there's two "T" words -- terrorist/m and torture. The obfuscated meaning of both is part of the shining legacy of the Department of Justice under Bush 2.
What does it mean when nearly 90% of a separatist or insurgent group's victims are civilians? I guess I'm naive. I guess I just don't understand modern asymmetrical warfare. Of course most victims are civilians -- they're there.
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Tourists, rejoice! Sure, you may have to wait all day in the summer heat to get tickets to the Potala Palace, but now Tibet is open in the winter too! No more long lines! No more hot dusty streets! Just cool, refreshing ice and snow.
Beijing is working Tibet into the Olympics, starting with the torch on Everest. But more generally they are planning to transform Tibet entirely, as they expect its quaint charm to be a tourist draw for Olympic visitors.
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Ajahn Punnadhammo asks: "Is there a doctrinal aspect of Buddhism that hinders action in the world?" In his most recent post, the Theravada monk goes on to offer an answer of his own:
Possibly. There is the underlying sense that this conditioned realm is inherently flawed and will always be so. However, there is also a very great emphasis on compassion for all beings caught in it. And there are plenty of scriptural references to the Buddha advising on how to live a comfortable and decent life within this world, and even commenting on what we would relate to as social or political questions.
The ajahn's post was inspired by Bhikkhu Bodhi's article appearing in the current issue of Buddhadharma, published by the Shambhala Sun, the Canadian bimonthly founded by the late Chogyam Trungpa Rincpoche.
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Check out this screenshot of the Fox News website this evening. (Click the graphic to see it life-size.) I think they missed a big story concerning the attorney general, but I'm not sure. I guess they're not on the ball today, because they also seem to have missed the hospitalization of Owen Wilson, a sad tabloid tale that would fit right in with their other top stories.
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Three bombs were discovered in Sri Lanka on Sunday, one of them in the town of Kandy along the route of a procession to honor the Buddha's Tooth Relic. The 10-day festival will go on regardless. Sri Lanka has lived with terrorism for a very long time, and the Temple housing the Tooth was damaged by a truck bomb in 1998.
Meanwhile, a Buddhist delegation arrived in Sri Lanka from another majority-Buddhist country involved in a civil war, Thailand. The fighting there is getting more violent. Visitors from Myanmar / Burma are also due in Sri Lanka.
Is it ironic that a Tooth Relic is held in a town called Kandy? Teeth are tough customers.
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If you're looking for info on Nepal you can't do much better than Mikel Dunham's blog. Frequent updates, in-depth articles, great photos, and even info for tourists planning to visit the country -- for Nepaloholics, this site has it all.
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A lot of Buddhists have become interested in yoga in recent years. Many meditators have expressed a need to "get in touch with their bodies," while others, not so interested, find enough in the Satipatthana Sutta to keep them going for a lifetime. If you are the stretching type, you might want to check out a few cautionary tales in yesterday's New York Times. A lech with a yoga mat may just get your leotard in a twist.
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Many people live with chronic pain with no hope of relief. But others have apparently had better luck relieving their suffering. Some notes on Vicodin and that family of painkillers from the AP:
More than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during 2005, the most recent year represented in the data. That is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in America.
I don't really know how much 300 milligrams is in terms of painkillers per person, but it sounds like a lot. I think the average dose is around 5 or 10 milligrams? No word on whether Rush Limbaugh was included in the counting. If so that might explain why the figures skew so high.
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When this blog started it received as its first visitors a rampaging horde of spambots -- this led to the restricted comment policy (only people with WordPress accounts could post) which led to the dearth of comments here, which bothered some people. Well, the gate is now lifted. Welcome, human commentors! Picture the armies of spambots doomed to troll the web eternally, looking for open doors. Are there 10 spambots for every human on the web? More?
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Interesting posts on D.T. Suzuki and Jodo Shinshu and Other-Power over at The Buddhist Nerd Haven, and a good article on China's (stage) management of Tibet courtesy of the New York Times.
Also, the National Review takes note of the controversy over making Buddhism the state religion in Thailand. Funny, the NR telling Thailand, a country with an active and virulent Muslim insurgency within its borders, to exercise patience and discretion in dealing with a terrorist threat. Physician, heal thyself.
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The current issues of two Buddhist publications contain articles about the eminent Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. The Shambhala Sun, founded by the pioneering Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (his son and heir, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, is now the publication's president), devotes sixteen pages to Nhat Hanh and features his photo on the cover. Inquiring Mind, “a journal of the vipassana community,” which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary, has an intriguing piece by Arnie Kotler, once Nhat Hanh’s editor, publisher, disciple, and assistant, that discusses the painful dissolution of their long and close relationship.
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Members of the Amitabha Buddhist Society, a Pure Land sect, released various fish, reptiles and other critters destined for dinner plates in New York's Chinatown into the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey this past Sunday. Well, someone told New Jersey and the state apparatus may be irked to the point of issuing a $1,000 fine. The Amitabha folks, many of them strict vegans, were doing their part to spare the animals some extreme suffering, but the state remembers those freaky walking snakehead fish (see pic, courtesy the U.S. Dept.
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As pointed out by the Worst Horse, here's a cool article on Team Tibet, a group of protesters who attended 11 major league games in early August.
A depressing article on cage-free eggs: cage-free doesn't mean cruelty-free. The message of the article is, people in the egg industry think consumers looking for cage-free eggs are basically idiots -- but we're idiots who may be willing to pay more -- for a label that ultimately means little.
Cage-free: At some point we have to take people's words for things, even if by "people" we mean a corporation. Otherwise we'll all be hopelessly cynical. It's about meaningful standards -- "organic", "natural", etc. -- and holding companies and people to those standards.
Animal cruelty.
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Danny Fisher reminds us of Hiroshima, sixty-two years (and now two days) ago. What is there to say but to wish for peace and hope that all of us may be free from suffering?
Speaking of Buddhist chaplains, check out this and this. And, here's a review of a book by a Buddhist at Abu Ghraib. Tricycle ran an interview with another Buddhist at Abu Ghraib in our summer issue. [Unfortunately, the interview is behind a paywall.
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Put down that Chicken McNugget / carrot / wild mushroom. No matter what you're eating, no matter how healthy or environmentally-friendly it's supposed to be, by eating it, you're destroying the planet. Nothing's safe, or sacred. "Food miles fly to top of consumer worry list," screams one headline (of course, that's in England, where with the whole foot-and-mouth thing they have to be more mindful of their food than Americans do.) Well, hold everything, food miles mean nothing, says some crank in the New York Times.
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